Excerpt:

Harold Bruff is a former U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney; currently, he is a professor of law (and former Dean) at the University of Colorado (Boulder) Law School. In his new book, Bad Advice: Bush's Lawyers In The War On Terror, Bruff has taken a critical look at the legal advice provided to President Bush and Vice President Cheney to deal with their "war on terror." His findings, as reported in the book, are not pretty....

DEAN: At the outset of your book, after noting its timeless nature of problems in advising the powerful, you raise the question regarding what behaviors – and you use the plural – should be expected, if not demanded, of lawyers serving an "insistent" client, and in the context of your study, a client who is a head of state?

BRUFF: The most important behavior is adherence to the simple ethical rule that governs all American lawyers. They must "exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice" to the client. Important and insistent clients, such as Presidents, may put heavy pressure on their lawyers to provide advice that serves policy goals, whatever the law might be. Accordingly, the lawyer really has two quite difficult tasks. First, he or she must have the courage, and the detachment from policy agendas, to say what the law requires, even if that advice is unwelcome. Second, the lawyer needs to have the skill to persuade a powerful client that this advice should be received and considered, even if the client is under no obligation to seek or follow the lawyer's advice.

By the same token, don't executive branch lawyers who provide bad advice need to be set straight by the boss?

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20090501.html and @ sig

Elephantman: "You doubt the veracity of what you are being told. You seek confirmation."

According to this by Jeff Stein,

The CIA's reliance on repeated, and brutal, "enhanced" interrogation techniques shows how few spies the spy agency had before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks....

When interrogation subjects coughed up some seemingly vital new information about new plots or al Qaeda personalities, the CIA had few means to check it against reports supplied by spies under its control, either in the terrorist group or elsewhere.

Everything they were hearing was new. By many accounts interrogators slapping suspects like hamburger patties didn't have a clue whether they were telling the truth. They didn't have independent sources of information to know what was up....

[When word got out about torture,] "it hurt CIA recruitment...It's, well, a vicious circle. Faced with a spy gap, the CIA has put greater and greater pressure on interrogators to wring confessions from suspects."

Elephantman: This is why the idea of waterboarding one of these guys a hundred or two hundred times, under the terms set forth by the OLC memos (only short exposures) makes sense to me.

That's the only word I can think of to describe this:

Our Tacit Approval of Torture

We need to come to terms with not just who did what, but our collective complicity with their decisions.

Unlike the Japanese internment, waterboarding was ordered and served up in secret. But it, too, was America's policy—not just Dick Cheney's. Congress was informed about what was happening and raised no objection. The public knew, too. The public knew, too. By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture upon those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention.

Online now, to be published in Newsweek's May 18 print edition: http://www.newsweek.com/id/195622

Bill E Pilgrim wrote upthread about this same apologia in the Kinsley's Washington Post article. Between this, the idea that torture "works," and the Obama apologists' delusions, all the bases are covered to prevent anyone from being held accountable. Can it get any worse?

pverniero@sillscummis.com

Veriero: http://www.sillscummis.com/Attorney/attorney.asp?id=1047

Hirschhorn: http://www.sillscummis.com/attorney/attorney.asp?id=136

It's Verniero (the email address I posted is correct).

Because those so-called sources are anonymous, I have no idea whether or not they even exist. I can only conclude that the "many reservations about Sotomayor" he lists are his opinions exclusively and after reviewing non-anonymous sources, that Rosen is but an uninformed OpEd writer with issues.

Professor Kar is a Professor of Law and Philosophy, and the Thomas Mengler Faculty Scholar, at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, beginning in the Fall of 2009.

Let me start with the obvious conclusion that anyone would draw if they were to get to know Judge Sotomayor and her work both intimately and deeply: she is an absolutely brilliant jurist and an absolutely brilliant person. Having clerked for her, worked very closely with her over the course of a year, and then known her well for more than a decade, I have a very good take on who she is both as a judge and as a person. Ordinarily, I would not weigh in on things like this, but, given some of the spurious comments that have been emerging from people who are less familiar with her, I feel a need to set the record straight....

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2009/05/on-the-brilliance-of-people-like-judge-sonia-sotomayor-and-barack-obama.html

Thanks for posting that. I really like the part about "no additional investigative work" needing to be done. We're moving forward some more. Cool.

BTW, Horstman’s memo the NYTimes quoted and the flawed IG report can be found here: http://cryptome.org